Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Treeless Mountain  (2008)

In a director’s statement circulated by her film’s publicist, writer/director So Yong Kim says Treeless Mountain, which is “inspired by events from my early childhood in Pusan, Korea,” doubles as “a letter to my mother.” This makes the film even more of a heartbreaker––if that’s even a possibility. An autobiographical feature about two tiny girls sent to live with distant relatives by their caring but insolvent mother, Treeless Mountain is a sparse but incredibly moving film about love turning to longing turning to resentment, and if I as a total outsider could barely hold back tears whilst watching it, I can only imagine the strength required to pull such a story from one’s own life and throw it up on a screen.

Jin (Hee Yeon Kim) is a preternaturally mature six year-old who maternally protects her even younger sister Bin (Song Hee) when the two go to live with their alcoholic aunt. The aunt is a cold woman, and something of a shyster. Clearly neither naturally capable nor interested in raising the girls properly, instead of sending them to school she gives the barely post-verbal Bin a bucket and orders her to a neighbor’s house to “beg for salt.” Big Aunt, as they call her, often passes out before cooking dinner, and the girls are left to fend for themselves. In a sad sign of how far they’ve drifted from relative normalcy, Bin and Jin are almost always seen in the middle section of the film wearing the same couple of articles of clothing––a princess play dress for Bin, remnants of her old school uniform for Jin––everything markedly more stained and dingy from scene to scene.

Hands down, the thing that makes Mountain a Toronto must-see is the performances, which are all the more impressive considering the fact that the film’s two young stars are non-actors–––Hee Yeon Kim was found in an elementary school in Seoul City, while five year-old Song Hee was auditioned along with her fellow housemates at a Korean orphange. Hee Yeon Kim’s performance as Jin is absolutely mind-blowing: trudging along with a sadness in her eyes that could only be described as world weary, she’s like a little adult trapped in the body of a girl barely old enough to go to school.

And so she must be. Adults vary rarely let children of this age in on what’s really happening, or why, and so it goes here: So Yong Kim’s camera spends the majority of the film trained in extreme close-up on Jin’s face, so that we can watch the little girl watching the adults and reacting silently to the world around her, and come to our own interpretations at the speed at which the child figures things out. Jin thus becomes not only Bin’s protector when their mother is gone and their aunt is too boozed-up to care, but she also becomes a kind of interpreter, translating what she’s come to realize are the harsh realities of their fate in such a way that the younger sister will have enough information to function, but won’t have to do as Jin has done, and process complications that she’s not ready to understand. So little actually happens in Mountain (and I don’t at all mean that pejoratively) that it would seem a shame to illuminate this more and thereby give away a plot point, but watch for a narrative thread involving a piggy bank. Within this single narrative strand, there’s not an actor in the world who couldn’t learn something about naturalism by watching hope gradually decay into dismay across Jin’s face.

Under discussion:

The Manchurian Candidate  (2004)

Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.

Anne Hathaway plays Kym Buchanan, a career drug addict who takes leave from her latest stint in rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (played Rosemarie DeWitt, who moves from her breakout role as Don Draper’s beatnik mistress on Mad Men to take on what seems like her righful place as a Maura Tierney/Catherine Keener type, a no-nonesense brunette destined to be counter-cast against ingenues). The wedding is set to take place at the Buchanan family’s sprawling Connecticut manse, which, to the externally prickly but internally fragile Kym’s dismay, has filled to bursting with assorted friends and family of the bride and groom, all with a different role to play in the weekend’s festivities under the watchful eye of the girls’ fastidiously caring father Paul (Bill Irwin) and his second wife Carol (Anna Deavere Smith). Kym drops into this swirl and instantly changes its chemistry with her acid tongue and total lack of filter. As she struggles to earn recognition and some modicum of trust and forgiveness from her weary sister, Kym forges a tenuous bond with best man Keiran (Mather Zickel)––who, like Kym, sneaks out daily to attend AA meetings––while also seeking out her mother (Debra Winger), who seems to be conspicuously distant; we soon learn that this is par for the course.

Hathaway is given the predictable cosmetic grit (homemade haircut, raccoon eyeliner, fingers constantly twitching for a smoke), but she turns Kym into something much more than a Hollywood cipher of addiction. She’s a bit of a girl who cried wolf: toxic though she can be, especially to those who are less than sympathetic to her struggles, Kym seems to be both serious about sobriety and deeply regretful regarding past, nearly unforgivable mistakes, but she’s made so many plays towards atonement in the past that anyone she’s hurt before is wary of getting fooled again. Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.

As the familial conflict builds to a violent breaking point and then becomes somewhat ameliorated by the boundless romance of the wedding and the wild joy of the all night dance party that follows (if nothing else, this is a fantastic example of the Endless Party movie), Kym’s frustration, sadness and sorrow uncomfortably and unignorably seeps in from the margins, like the smoke from her constant cigarette floating over from her solitary corner of the room. The most exciting thing about Rachel may be its refusal to permanently sort out the family’s life-long problems in the space of the film. Even as practical truces are formed and a tentative romance just barely begins to bloom, we get the sense that progress will be slow, leaving a damp-eyed Rachel to smoke alone in a corner at many supposedly fun functions in the future.

Despite the presence of star Hathaway, Rachel’s commerical prospects are probably slim, which makes it all the more puzzling that this film is having its North American prmiere here in Toronto this weekend and not last weekend in Telluride. Why this film was reportedly rejected by that exclusive festival is a mystery to me. Supremely artful in its formal riskiness and at least as emotionally raw and resonant as a good deal of the Cannes holdovers that did make the line-up, its omission in favor of forgettable domestic products like Flash of Genius and American Violets is inexplicable.

Under discussion:

The Thin Man  (1934)

Jersey Girl  (2004)

Juno  (2007)

Slumdog Millionaire  (2009)

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist  (2008)

Zack & Miri Make a Porno  (2008)

Religulous  (2008)

Medicine For Melancholy  (2008)

A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël)  (2008)

Three Blind Mice  (2008)

Valentino: The Last Emperor  (2008)

Pedro  (2008)

Paris, Not France  (2008)

The Hurt Locker  (2008)

The Dungeon Masters  (2008)

The Lucky Ones  (2008)

The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, and Kevin Kelly and I will be there for the next ten days reporting back. What follows is not exactly an iron-clad preview of our Toronto coverage––in addition to some of the films below, I’m definitely planning to see new works by Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Jonathan Demme and Richard Linklater, and would of course recommend that anyone on the ground see some of my favorites from past festivals, including Medicine for Melancholy and A Christmas Tale. This is more of a list of predictions of what everyone else is going to be talking about, while I’m pushing my glasses up my nose and rushing to to the next screening of the a South Korean movie about drunken lonliness. Enjoy! If you have your own predictions for what will catch fire in Ontario, let us know in the comments.

1. Zach and Miri Make a Porno (TIFF screening info)

Obviously, anything with “porno” in the title has a certain automatic contingent (hello, Google searchers! Sorry to disappoint!) But then, so does anything with the credit “written and directed by Kevin Smith.” And then there’s the leading man. Some perspective: Smith’s last three films have grossed an average of $26 million each; the last three films starring Seth Rogen have grossed an average of $117 million each. With Jay and Silent Bob finally retired (we think/hope), and Rogen in tow for the usual, MPAA-baiting Smithism, Porno could––however ironically––become what Jersey Girl was supposed to be: the tipping point that expands the Smith fan base beyond the longtime Clerks faithful.

2. Slumdog Millionaire (TIFF screening info)

Crowdpleasers make me itch. But then, to borrow a line from David Fincher, I’m an asshole. Assuming you are not, you might be interested to know that Slumdog Millionaire shows all the symptoms of becoming The Next Juno. Like Juno, Slumdog premiered in a TBA slot at Telluride, where reaction from all but our own Kevin Buist was enthusiastic, even hyperbolically so. Also ike Juno, it’s a music-fueled piece of pop art in which young love results from unlikely circumstances. And, thanks to Warner Brothers’ loss of faith in this tier of the distribution market, it’s now being distributed by Fox Searchlight––just like Juno. If looking for The Next Juno is now part of our jobs, at least Searchlight is taking all the arduous work out of it.

3. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (TIFF screening info)

Speaking of two devils…Michael Cera, of course, had a pretty great 2007 as an associate of both Judd Apatow and Diablo Cody, and  I think at this point, he’s star enough to guarantee some festival buzz on his own. But even more interesting is his paring in Nick and Norah with Kat Dennings, the actress who played Catherine Keener’s daughter in the 40 Year-Old Virgin, who is quickly becoming a target of fan worship on YouTube. In a video called Kat Dennings sexiest woman alive, YouTube user concedes that inkamagonkhpjacki Dennings might actually be second to Angelina Jolie, which is fitting; like the young Jolie, Dennings is a little busty, a little reckless-looking, maybe even a little goth, but––and this is *not* like the sometime Gia impersonator––at the same time kind of goofy and totally unintimidating. In the most recent video on her own YouTube channel, she puts a blanket on her head, wraps stuffed animals around her shoulders like a fur stole, then grabs a guitar and shrugs: “I don’t know, I like reading.” More, please. Also: I’m pretending like the character names (based on a book of the same name) are a Thin Man reference.

4. The Dungeon Masters (TIFF screening info)
The pedigree: Director Keven McAlester, whose last film was the festival hit Roky Erickson doc, You’re Gonna Miss Me; and Lee Daniel, the cinematographer of Miss Me as well as much of Richard Linklater’s filmography. The hook: a year-long glimpse into the lives of three adults who are really into Dungeons and Dragons. The verdict: irresistible bait for both indie film nerds and nerd nerds, and, if McAlester’s previous work is any indication, likely more probing and sensitive a portrait than the logline might at first glance indicate.

5. Pedro (TIFF screening info)

Produced by Wash Westmoreland (whose Quincinera won the grand prize at Sundance in 2006), Nick Oceano’s first feature is an examination of the birth of reality TV as factory for both new celebrities and cultural attitudes, via the life and early death of Pedro Zamora, AIDS activist and cast member of the Real World San Francisco, The Movie. Which sounds very important, as does the fact that this is (I believe) the first fictional film that will ostensibly reenact moments from reality TV. But we’ll excuse you if you read the above and thought only, “OMG, Puck! OMG, the peanut butter fight!!!”

6.  Religulous (TIFF screening info)

Why anyone takes Bill Maher’s Borscht Belt-to-Venice Beach schtick seriously I don’t know (I suspect that if he didn’t have a Bush Jr to play off, his primary cause would be Legalizing It), but Religulous hardly needs to convert me, or anyone else. In a year in which Ben Stein’s Expelled has become the top grossing non-fiction film––beating Martin Scorsese and the Stones––by playing in non-traditional venues and appealing strictly to an audience already in its “give intelligent design a chance” wheelhouse, and in which a Republican presidential candidate picks a running mate whose conservative social politics seem like bait for the neo-conservative party wing said presidential candidate used to claim he wasn’t beholden to, it seems clear that faith is the sleeper issue of the day. I may take issue with his cringey jokes, but I still see no reason to underestimate the impact Maher and his Religulous director/savvier comic provacateur Larry Charles will have on the large portion of the typical film festival audience with which their choir overlaps.

7.  Valentino: The Last Emperor (TIFF screening info)

Reviews out of Venice grumbled about a lack of depth in Valentino’s setting but offered praise for the poignancy of the characters. For those of us who have been longing for a fully-realized epic fashion doc since Unzipped––or, a semi-serious, semi-guilty pleasure celebrity doc full of cheap but completely satisfying La Dolce Vita references since Truth or Dare––Valentino, directed by Vanity Fair reporter Matt Tyrnauer, shouldn’t disappoint.

8.  Che (TIFF screening info)

Steven Soderbergh’s troubled epic might have placed higher on the list had its once-dire distribution situation not recently began to look up, but it’s still by all means impossible to argue against its status as a must-see. Che will have one screening in Toronto in its 262 minute incarnation; Parts 1 and 2 will then screen twice on their own. Just having the ability to Choose Your Che should cause a certain amount of chatter. I’m imagining (and sort of fearing) the arguments from Che completists over The Right Way To See It as we speak.

9.  The Hurt Locker (TIFF screening info)

One of a number of films at TIFF dealing with soldiers either in, just returned from, or on their way to Iraq (see also 3 Blind Mice, Lucky Ones). The Hurt Locker has an obvious advantage within a micro-genre of films that have tended to fall pretty flat with both audiences and critics: it’s essentially a big-budget action thriller. And it’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow of Strange Days and Point Break fame, so it’s got a good chance of putting action above ideology without being totally brainless.

10.  Paris, Not France (TIFF Screening info)

As Charles Aaron used to say, I give.

Under discussion:

Che  (2008)

Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”

Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once.  We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”

But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. On the surface, you’ve got a rich, fame-hungry girl who allows a filmmaker to document her for publicity purposes as she tries to legitimize her outsized fame by recording an album. A couple of years later, that album is universally considered a joke, and those publicity materials have been expanded into a stand-alone film about Hilton’s relationship to her own celebrity. Paris has obviously lost control, and she’s obviously siccing Daddy’s lawyers on Petty et al in an effort to take that control back.

But I don’t think we should at all assume that Paris is concerned about whatever the film reveals. Zeitchik predicted that the film would “likely be seen once [at TIFF] and nowhere else afterward…[since] costs from the legal wrangling simply wouldn’t be worth the financial upside for a buyer…like Soderbergh’s Che at Cannes, you may never get a chance to see it this way again.”

Again, this might be a reasonable assumption if we were dealing with the usual celebrity, but Paris has made a career out of managing the release of imagery that she supposedly didn’t want us to see. From the sex tape which she first sued over and then transformed into both a cash cow and a career platform, to the prison stay that turned into a week-long, weepy melodrama and dominated the news cycle all the way up to Paris’ march out of the county jail and into her mother’s waiting getaway vehicle, all of Hilton’s career high points have involved the transformation of humiliation into triumph. It’s not that her reputation is “based on shamelessness”––it’s that she continually turns events that should be shameful into products for public consumption. I don’t think we’re dealing with anything different here, and I don’t think we shold be surprised.

It would be one thing if the Hilton camp has insisted that the film be removed from the festival completely––I don’t know the laws, but this is something I assume they would have the right to do, considering that Petty’s footage came from her contract to produce publicity materials for a DVD and is now going towards personal use––but they didn’t. Instead, they’ve made tickets to Paris‘ single TIFF screening a hot commodity. Though technically this single screening at the Ryerson (one of TIFF’s largest venues with about 1200 seats) is open to the public, behind the scenes press and industry folks will jockey for tickets, sucking attention away from the Fest’s competing red carpet events, all but guaranteeing Hilton dominance of the following day’s TIFF coverage. To compare Paris, an unseen celebrity documentary by a first-time filmmaker to Che’s premiere at Cannes–-which, when added in with the film’s seemingly eternal North American distribution limbo, could be seen as a one-film referendum on the state of contemporary auteur cinema––only plays into the Paris plot. Hilton and her people have managed to turn a run-of-the-mill film festival premiere into an must-attend event coulded in mystery. Still think she’s stupid?

Under discussion:

Mrs. Doubtfire  (1993)

“I thought it was a great drag show, like Mrs. Doubtfire. You’ve blown the family, it isn’t working, so you come back in a different costume, and you take custody of the kids. So you come back as Mrs. Doubtfire.”

–Today in Increasingly Arbitrary Movie References From Political Pundits: Chris Matthews’ verdict on Tuesday night at the RNC.

With the 2008 Telluride Film Festival wrapping up tonight, we’re in the process of posting our final reviews and uploading photos to Flickr. Above, the annual group shot of all the Festival’s filmmakers and guests. Check out our full Flickr stream here.

“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”

These were some of the first words out of moderator Annete Insdorf, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.

“Technology is leaving behind much that we are fond of,” Schrader warned. “I personally believe that movies are a 20th century art form, and they’re basically over.” Several times over the course of the session, Schrader expressed enthusiasm for short-form episodic work made on low budgets for small screens. Referencing the rise number of “professional” media makers who have jumped to the webseries format, Schrader announced that he’s currently planning a film that would exist in a couple of different versions: one feature designed for arthouses, and one “X-rated” version, cut into 12, 5-minute episodes, for viewing on cellphones and/or on the web. Schrader’s not planning to go this route because it’s lucrative, but because it’s what he sees as our inevitable future. “There’s [currently] no money in it, but it’s much better to gore the ox than to hold the ox that’s being gored.”

Schrader’s doomcasting right at the beginning of the panel established an extreme for the other speakers to work against. “Before Paul’s apocalypse takes place,” Danny Boyle said, “The star system may change a bit.” He noted that in the six months he was in India shooting Slumdog Millionaire, Will Smith was in Mumbai twice setting up various deals. He predicted that all stars and filmmakers will have to start seeing themselves as global brands–something that might be tough for the British. “We don’t deserve to make films,” Boyle said of his countrymen. “We make music, and we’re good at it, but we get what we deserve, really. Which is Harry Potter.”

Michael Barker, for his part, blamed the global economic crisis on any downturn in box office receipts, and denied that the actual act of distribution had become appreciably more difficult in recent years. “It’s always been difficult. Just the variables change.” He paused. “Paul, you’re killing me, man. I think the danger here is absolutism on any of these iss